Happy Happy birthday, Jacob dear...

One of the hardest things about August is getting ready for Jacob's birthday.  It's not that it is unenjoyable, because we love our son and are grateful for the opportunity to celebrate his birth.  No, our angst comes from a completely different angle.  We have the hardest time trying to figure out what to get him for presents.  

You see, Jacob is an individual who is VERY focused in what he likes.  At any given time, he has a maximum of 2 things that he is "in" to, and these periods usually last for over a year.  That means that any time we treat him with something or a major present-accompanying holiday comes by we try to find something that is related to one of those 2 (if we're lucky) things.  What this means long-term, is that if he is "in" to the same thing for a really long period of time, we run out of DIFFERENT things to get him that he would be interested in.

Such was the case this year.  Jacob has been in to The Legend of Zelda for a long time now.  A REALLY long time...  So much so that we have run out of "run-of-the-mill" things to get him that relate to that interest.  In desperation, we started putting aside for something that was a bit more than we would traditionally spend on a birthday present.  We decided to get him a used Nintendo Wii U so that he could have the last Zelda game that he wanted but didn't have.  Somebody MIGHT have been excited...

SO excited in fact, that we just HAD to have his friend (and his family) over to hang out and "share" it with.

Then there was the obligatory "candles on the cake" shots.  Both our kids are starting to get "up enough in years" that if we keep doing a candle per year, there's going to be more candles than cake.  We're going to have to go to using those number-shaped candles soon.  How did we get to a place in life where we have kids that old?  That's for OLD people... :P

 

We are so grateful for our family, especially our son on this, his birthday.  He is turning into such a gentle and caring young man and we are so pleased with him.  We love you, Jacob!  Happy Birthday, and may you have many more to come!

- Josh                      

Jacob's 10th Birthday

Once a year, it comes to us all.  That day of days comes where we celebrate a personal event which we had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with aside from simply showing up... the day we were born.  Jacob, when he celebrates, usually celebrates things with his crazy dance moves...

This year, we were INCREDIBLY lucky and found a deal that was too good to pass up for a gift for him.  Since we're homeschooling now (and will be including some programming and online resource sites), and because he wanted a way to play MineCraft on his own, we, after hunting for months, found a steal of a deal on a computer for him (THANK YOU CRAIGSLIST!!!).  We surprised him with it, but it still took him a few seconds to fully process what was going on.

So naturally, we had to get a shot of him playing MineCraft.  As an additional surprise, an online friend of mine and I put together a "family-friendly" MineCraft server for the kids to play on as well as a few of our friends and their kids.  Because the bulk of us are likely to be members of the Church, we named it MormonCraft.  I spent several hours today playing with him.  While I'm not anywhere near as big of an aficionado as he is, we had quite a bit of fun.

In the evening, we had our friends the Robinsons and the Dowers over for cake and ice cream and for Jacob to show off his stuff.  The Dowers family brought him a "creeper" hat from MineCraft.  He naturally had to start wearing it immediately.

One of the joys of a combination camera and video camera is that you can capture stuff like this without having to try to time the shutter JUST RIGHT to get him blowing out the candles:

Some photographs of our friends who came to help us celebrate...

And we managed to get a shot of all the kids that were in attendance by our fireplace (we HAVE a fireplace...and a mantle too.  How crazy is THAT?).  Of course, not all of them are actually looking at the camera, because, as any parent knows, getting THAT many kids to all do the same thing is more difficult than herding cats.

So our little man turned 10.  We sure love him and who he is growing up to be.

Like most 10 year old boys, he has a fairly single-track mind (which is sometimes irritating), but that mind can come up with some of the most amazing things if you watch carefully enough.  It is so fun to watch him learn and explore new things.  We can't wait to see what another year brings.

- Josh